How to Paint Dragonflies

Hi everybody, thanks so much for joining me today for this painting tutorial. I'm going to be showing you step-by-step how to paint some dragonflies today on a 16 by 20 primed stretched canvas. I used one coat of white acrylic gesso just to prep the canvas so that it takes the paint better and smoother and it also helps to hold the color so it won't dull or fade after time. I'm just going to go over the colors with you right now. I've got ultramarine blue, turquoise, luminous rose, phthalo blue, and titanium white. Now this is just to create the background and of course we'll be adding some more colors later on as we add our dragonflies to this painting. So if you guys are ready let's begin. I'm going to be using a three inch round chalk paintbrush for this as well. I'm going to get it a little bit wet and this is just a really nice brush I like to use for creating backgrounds and skies. And first I'm going to just add a little bit of water to the canvas. This will also help the paint blend on a lot more smoothly onto this canvas. You definitely don't want it dripping you just want to have it a little bit damp. So I'm gonna start with a little bit of white, a little bit of phthalo blue, and for no specific reason at all I'm just going to randomly do this. Just start twisting my brush around in circles. Now if you don't have this brush don't worry at all you can use any large blending brush that you already have. I'm going to take a little bit more of my phthalo blue and come in lightly over the top. So what I'm trying to create here is just a blurry sort of background of whatever these dragonflies are around. Okay I'm going to come in with my next color now and I'm gonna take turquoise without washing my brush off and I think this time I'll come right down here and start to overlap. So see how it starts to blend in nicely to that phthalo blue. I'm gonna take some of my ultramarine blue now and I'll start adding it right in here. I'm still doing that same technique creating those small puffy circles. Switch over to one of my large mop blending brushes. It's nice and soft and I'll be taking some of my magenta or luminous rose. So yeah if you don't have magenta or luminous rose you can also just use any deep dark pink that you might have or even purple will look pretty too. So I'm gonna start right up here in the far left corner and I'm gonna blend it right into the turquoise and we'll see what pretty colors we can make by doing that. It's sort of a pretty smoky tone. Go ahead and pick up some more. I'm gonna start overlapping. Now you can do this if your paint is drying in between but it will work a little bit better if your paint is still wet underneath. So if you're working wet on wet you'll get all those different tones happening which is really pretty. I'm gonna come in here and add some of this rose so it's gonna make a really pretty violet. A little bit extra white this time. So if we have a nice rich colorful background like this or just something a little bit dark it's gonna really help the detail on our dragonfly stand out because they're very light in color right and very delicate. So if you're gonna keep that in mind when you're creating your background you can do any background you want but just so you guys know if you're gonna choose a really light light background it's gonna compete too much with your dragonfly wings and you're not gonna really see them very much. It's gonna be a little bit tougher to get that contrast happening. So I'm gonna pick up a little bit of white and I still have lots of paint in my brush. A little bit more turquoise and white now. So I'm just gonna keep, without taking my brush off the canvas, I'm just twirling my way around picking up colors along the way and letting them just all kind of marble together and blend. I'll just take a little bit of water now just to loosen up some of that paint on my brush and be able to get down down in here at the bottom of the canvas. It's a little bit tricky sometimes depending on what type of easel you have. Mine's kind of tucked in there. Go over this a little bit more. It's a little bit too light. I'd have to switch over to another brush now. I've got lots of these on hand just in case I need I need to so it's kind of a good idea to do that. So I've got a little bit of phthalo, a little bit of white and turquoise. I just want to darken this area up a little bit. Okay so I'm gonna dry this off now and see how it looks because it's going to definitely dry a little bit darker. Okay so I think this looks really pretty. I'm liking all these colors. There's a couple spots here where I can still see the canvas so I need to cover that up with some more paint and I'll just take a little just any of the first brush I chose. It's not really important which one so I'm just going to take this and just come in there and fill that up. Take my cobalt or ultramarine blue and just kind of come in here just along the edge to fill that in and then right along the bottom too. It's a lot easier and smarter to do this while you still have all these colors wet on your palette rather than waiting till later to come back and do that. Then you're gonna have to try and match everything up and pour all that paint out again. I've still got so much paint here I'll be using this for another painting I'm sure. Can't put it back in the tube now. Now what I'd like to do is I'm going to continue to use this brush and just take a little bit of water, white and whatever's left in my brush so I've got some of these colors here. I'm just gonna twist and roll my brush around and what this is doing is gonna make it look like there's some light peeking through. I mean this could be this background could actually be the sky and a magical magical looking sky with clouds that the butterflies are sort of looking up towards and I still want it to look blurry so I'm gonna just dry brush kind of smush and blend my paint around pushing gently with a brush. It always sounds a lot louder through the videos sounds like I'm wrecking my brush but I promise you it's very very gentle. So you can add as many of these little veins or whatever you want to call them little wiggle wiggles and squiggles for your clouds as you want but I'm pretty excited to get started on my dragonflies so I'm gonna move this along just add a little bit of pink in here before I begin. I don't want it too too busy well I don't want mine to be too busy because I want the focus to be on the dragonflies but it's always nice to have a little bit of light somewhere in the background and we can always come back in a little bit later and be careful around the dragonflies if we want to add some more to the background this is a large canvas and there's definitely lots of room to play around all right guys so the brush I'm going to be using for the dragonflies will be a filbert brush to begin we're gonna work on the wings first and then we'll add the body after because the body kind of will be in front and the wings will be kind of tucked in on the side so you can do it either way but that's just how I'm gonna approach it today today that's what makes sense to me and that's how I would approach it. Now I don't want to accidentally make my wings too big so I'm gonna choose a smaller brush for this size of canvas just so that I'm on the safe side this is a number eight filbert so I think this will be a good choice and I'm gonna begin by taking a little bit of white a little water on my brush I want to do this very delicately first the placement I think we'll have them kind of in the middle here as a focal point and we'll do a line like that and then we'll do a line like that okay so just two lines like that everybody can do that that's not so hard then we'll make a little bit scooped up so from here scoop and then join those we'll do just a little little squiggle in here and then we'll do the same thing make the ends of the wing rounded I'm gonna take a little bit more white and then we can come in we can play around with this see with it when you have watered-down paint and we can add a few little lines you can also push off and take some of it off if you feel like you added too much so keeping your paint nice and thin like that will be a lot easier to work with now you can use so many different brushes to create little lines and patterns this is working for me so far just little lines like this they're so small that we're not really going to see them so I'm not going to worry too too much about it not at this point anyways I just want to focus on the shape and the placement of my wings I'm gonna go right back load my brush up again water a little bit of white and we'll come down we'll leave a little space so about that much of a space and we're just gonna go almost almost a slight curve down like that this way is gonna come up a little bit higher than this one so we'll make it either you can go back and make this one a little bit longer or this one a little bit shorter now this shape of this one is going to be more like a rounded triangle and then we can bring it up here whatever kind of design that you want so I'm going to take that off where I brought it down a little bit too low very little paint so there are first set of wings and then you can come in and start adding more white where you want to do little dabs so the next step I'm going to show you is creating some shadows some a little bit of contrast on the wings and for that I'm going to be taking a little bit of my black I'm going to take a little liner brush this is a number 10 liner brush and I'm going to make a sort of a dark gray I'm going to water it down remember we want these details to be very delicate so it's easier to come back in with a darker color and to take it off if we add too much make it look too dark okay so a little bit on the tip of my brush and just start to come inside and add a little bit of shadow and contrast here very delicately and then a little bit more of the black to outline I'm bringing it down a little bit and then going up come back in with a little bit more white I'm going to choose some areas here to add a little bit more details to do the same thing on the top and then I'm actually going to be showing you guys a really neat brush that you can use for creating some patterns so the neat brush that I have is this one it's an even tail with fan brush so what you can do with this brush that's really cool is that you can whatever color you want to use in this case I'm going to be using a little bit of a white a little watered down white and you can get an instant pattern without having to take your time to do each one singularly so you want it to a little equal parts water and paint I'll just add a little bit more water and I'm going to come from the bottom and then you get a really nice uniform pattern like that and do the same thing on the top and you can use this brush for butterflies moths I've used this to paint patterns on animals fur as well and especially like elephants they have okay so I'm gonna move on to the body I hope I still have I think I still got some of my iridescent paint I'm gonna use a little bit of that if I if I can find it I don't want to look for it now I want to continue painting but if I don't have it that's just an idea for you guys to do a final little magical touch to your dragonfly wings is just do a little light coat of iridescent pearl or even like a little bit of silver whatever your choice is whatever you like I would I like the iridescent that has like a bit of a shimmer of all colors when the light hits it it's sort of um light how do you call it shifting color shifting so let's work on the body now and I'm going to begin with yellow ochre so I've got my number eight filbert brush you're just gonna get a little bit on the tip of my brush like this and I'll start with the head that comes up here so we'll just do a little round I'd like that and then it's going to get narrower and then of course they have really long bodies that come down to about there I'm going to take a little bit of white and mix it in with my yellow ochre over the top with a little bit more white this will help to make highlights and also make it look shiny I'm going to be applying little kind of dots like this in between but you can make any pattern that you want feel very free with your version of this and your dragonfly or you can follow along and then I'm going to be pulling them out a little bit longer and lower take a little bit more of my white gently come inside and I'm going to switch over to one of my liner brushes to do the fine black details on the body so I've got my number two liner sort of a thicker liner than the other one I was using and I'm just going to scoop into my black without getting it wet first so I'm going to do a little outline come inside do two little circles like that I'm just going to start outlining the body and then each time I do a little outline here I'm going to just add a few little faint lines we go up towards the wing like this and then continue down the body outlining each of these little circles and then as we get towards here we're going to kind of push making it a little bit wider and then narrower and narrower as we go down I find one side easier than the other to do work out these shapes a little bit better making sure I have it nice and nice and bright where I want it to be come back to the black just so I can add some little dabs in here bring a few little black lines in here on the side I'm going to come in now with a little bit more white now so this one's going to be overlapping this one a little bit but I'm going to do the wings first I'm going to start for the bottom set of wings one right over so that it meets right about here and then bring it down slightly lower like that one and a little bit of a pattern work off some of this paint on this side there's just so many different ways you could approach the wings so many different brushes you could use I hope today that I have given you guys some more ideas and helped you out so I know this has been this is a popular request I've been getting so I thought it was time to do it this one's going to come just past here and up on the other side I'm gonna come in with my little liner brush and do those light details with the black and the white and pick up just a little bit more of the black there that's a little bit darker and a little scoop in there for the starting stages of the pattern and we'll move on to the other side I'm gonna just do some little almost like little squares like that taking a little bit more black this time just using the very tip of my brush I have a little black thicker shorter thicker line right on the end of the wings right at the top here okay and now I'm going to come in with my little wisp fan brush get it wet again load it up with a white kind of wiggle I'm just gonna add a little dab here just create my own pattern sometimes just a few little dots I'm gonna take my yellow ochre take a little bit of white this time so I know I want it to be a little bit lighter so this one's gonna be a little bit wider than this because of the angle that it's on we're gonna see its side as well as the top okay now we'll come in with a little bit of white those highlights right there at the top of the head I'm gonna dry this off and then come in with my black pattern and details I'll be using my same number two brush I'm gonna go ahead take my black I'll start up here by placing eye one eye right there little I down below we'll do a thin outline little scoops little lines little delicate lines in there follow from the body and create little patterns and shadows along the way we're gonna do because this is a bit different than view the angle that this is on so we're going to do a thicker black line along the side we're still gonna see some yellow so we're gonna not halfway you want to bring it past your halfway mark the body and then over as we get to the end of the tail I'm gonna do some lines across like that I'm gonna take my wisp fan again so little dabs are nice too because it kind of gives it a bit of a sparkle maybe there's a little bit of dew on their wings I think I'm gonna choose a few little spots here I'm gonna have a little bit twinkling sparkle just taking that way I'm having a few little dabs here little dabs here and there and I want to bring in a little bit of light down here as well so I'm gonna be using my filbert brush again and working on that first so I'm going to take a some soft rays back here little indication of some light I'm gonna continue doing this but I want to dry this off first and make sure that I'm not picking up because that's still pretty wet so I'll be using this size and it's a number 11 take a little bit of water on my brush just to loosen up the bristles so that I can get a thin transparent Sunray effect and I think right in here I'm just gonna start building some light where those light rays are hitting you'll probably see a little something in here soften that with my finger you take white on the tip of my brush I'm just gonna stumble softly around here like the way that looks I'm gonna take my little liner brush here and add just another little bit of peaks on my on these clouds look small far away still got some of my luminous rose I'm going to take some of that with my white and just accent some of these clouds here the light will be getting some light from those rays and then soften with your finger take a little bit of this light pink and just start dusting over new areas on the wings because I don't have any iridescent paint so I want to create that sort of rainbow effect on the wings by taking pastel colors so along with I've got my neon yellow here there's some white sort of shimmery then I'll take some of my pink you can just soften with your finger just subtle little highlights like that look really pretty take a little something in here just to add a little bit more color I'm going to tint them with or tint my white with a little bit of pink then I'm going to take my little bit of neon yellow and white and come right from here so I want to thank you guys so much for joining me today this was a lot of fun to paint thank you so much for requesting this on patreon and I look forward to sharing my next video and tutorial with you all so happy painting have a wonderful day and I'll see you soon don't forget to subscribe to my channel give this video a like and comment below if you enjoyed watching this one bye everybody